Just Because You Are Paranoid Doesn’t Mean They Aren’t Out To Get You

Peony D Beckside

( Hide in Plain Sight Marcie tried to warn Teresa, now Teresa Point of View)

Marcie was right!  I thought her hopelessly paranoid, totally delusional, but she was not.  I in my arrogance and distrustful stupidity didn’t believe her warning.  What she’d tried to tell me was so outlandish, so ridiculous, so impossible that I could not even consider that it could be true.  I’d even scoffed, likening her fears to the 1930’s scares about ‘white-slavers’.

They say that ‘the best way to tell a lie, is to tell the absolute literal truth in a way that no-one can possibly believe it’.  A corollary of that is that if someone tells you a story that’s so unbelievably fantastic then most people, and in this case I, will take that as being a lie; or as Marcie is a friend, that she’s ‘lost the plot’ totally, even if the story is absolutely true.  Of course, you the reader of this hastily scribbled missive will have to take my story as me being just as paranoid as I had thought Marcie.

Marcie had tried to warn me, to tell me of my danger, my stupidity.  I know not if this message will ever get to anyone on Earth so as to be a warning to others, even if not heeded; as I had not heeded Marcie’s.  All I can do is issue it, even knowing the barriers to belief it will face.  It would be wrong of me, and cowardly if I did not at least attempt to give someone, some other woman the ‘heads-up’ about the dangers of the ‘K’ boutique, the lingerie and perfume shop in the City Mall if I at all can.

I fear very much that I will be punished, whipped most likely, for my temerity.  In a moment of opportunity as my training class were being led back to our cells, I reached for and purloined a sheet of paper and a marking stick from an overseers desk.  I scrawl my story with this crude carbon stick.  Where I will hide my story, how I will promulgate it, I have yet to work out.  Even if it is found by my jailers, or by Kelima our trainer, they will likely be unable to read it, since it is in English, not the weird mishmash language they seem to use here.  They might have someone who can translate.  Doubtful one of the other slaves in my group, as none of us as yet, has learned enough Gorean to be able to read it to them in that tongue.

Yes, by the laws of this place, Gor I believe it’s called, I am a slave.  A largely untrained one.  I wear a metal collar locked round my throat.  I cannot remove it.  I have been branded, as an animal would be; and I’m told that for all legal purposes even though human, I am classed as being no more than an animal.  As such I have no so-called ‘Human Rights’.  As a slave, until given one, I  do not have a name.  In the slave pens and training rooms, I am known only by the number 56-10176.  I believe that the latter part of this number may be some kind of year number.  Before my capture, transport and enslavement I was called Teresa.  I dare not even think of myself as Teresa anymore.  62-10176 tried to retain her previous name.  Her screams under the lash still ring through my brain, particularly late at night.  Why am I risking being punished in that manner and severity?  I don’t want to be hurt, to be made to scream and beg for the pain to stop. Which is why what I’m doing is particularly stupid.

Stupid, yes, but I like to think that I am not a coward.

So, ladies, what is it that you should be aware of, beware of?  In the Mall there is a new shop.  I had seen it when alone in the Mall.  It sells the most exquisite lingerie and perfumes I think that I’ve ever come across.  It’s sign is like a kind of stylised letter K, with a stern upright and two flowery tendrils snaking away to the right.  Marcie told me that the symbol is called a ‘kef’ in the language of what she had always believed was a fictionalised planet written of in a series of books by a ‘John Norman.’  Kef being the letter K in that language symbolises the word ‘kajira’ or slave-girl as we would say.  The kef as a symbol identifies a woman as just such a slave.  It is the most common form of brand applied to such ‘merchandise’.  It is the mark burned into the flesh of my left thigh.  God! How I’d screamed when the red-hot iron was pressed into my thigh!

I digress.  I know now that this world, this planet Gor is not the fictional place I’d never before heard of, but Marcie had taken to be fiction.  According to Marcie there is a whole organisation on Earth tasked with kidnapping beautiful women for sale as slaves on planet Gor.  The shop in the Mall it seems is run by them as a trap, and I had walked right into it.  Naturally I’d pooh-poohed such a ridiculous tale when Marcie had told me about it.  I’d told Marcie of this shop, and was showing her where it was with a view to her getting some of the lovely ‘bedtime’ attire.

We had been very close buddies until the moment that Marcie saw the sign above the shop doorway.  It shocked her, terrified her, because even though she had until then, thought that Gor, and kajirae in particular, were simply fiction.  It forced on her, I think, a complete re-evaluation of everything she believed about Gor.  Me, not knowing of it at all, had that previous time just wandered blithely into the shop seeking an exciting outfit to please my man, Bob.  Innocently, I’d paid for that outfit by card, and even given the shop assistant my e-mail address.  With that data, the Gorean slavers had no difficulty in finding out everything they needed to capture me.

I fear now for Earth women, the proliferation of this business into other shopping Mall’s.

Marcie would not go anywhere near the shop, and earnestly bade me never to go there again. I assume that she hoped she was wrong about the place, that it wasn’t a trap; sadly for me it was.

Such was Marcie’s terror not just for me, but that she feared the Gorean slavers were watching us at that very moment, and might also note Marcie herself as being suitable for kidnap and enslavement.  But then Marcie is beautiful, almost as much so as I.  I’m in no doubt that if the Goran slavers ever do take note of her, then like me, she’ll be brought to this planet to share a similar fate to mine.  I sure hope that she escapes such attention.  I’d be appalled if she wound up being enslaved from association with me, and due to my total lack of caution.

To add insult to injury, in case of just such observation of us together, Marcie had suggested that we not be seen in public together, for a while or so at least.  She knowing, and now believing, what I didn’t and even if I did, could not possibly believe.  I had thought her totally deluded: Paranoid beyond belief.  I had taken her care of me and her own fear for herself as offence; as her not wanting anything to do with me, as her turning away from me as having some kind of communicable disease or something.

Marcie had warned me to be on the look-out for strange men appearing to be watching me, and any indications that someone had been in my flat[1].  If I should suspect anything like this, I should immediately run away and start a new life somewhere else.  Easier said than done in this day and age.

And sure, there were strange men.  In my arrogance I took them to be admiring my beauty. They were of course, but not in the way that I would have appreciated.  Disconcertingly, when I caught them staring at me I would turn and stare back.  Usually when I do this, men turn away in embarrassment.  Not these men.  Having effectively forgotten Marcie’s warning, I simply wrote these men off as being rather boorish.  As for people being in my flat, given how untidy I am by nature, I wouldn’t know whether they’d been or not.

I had no advance warning, other than Marcie’s and the boorish men.  I went to bed one night, and what I took to be the next morning woke up in a cage!  I screamed of course.

The thing about beautiful women, and I’ve enough vanity to think myself so, is our incredible arrogance.  We get to think that the world exists for us, that we are the centre of it, that with a few precautions nothing bad can happen to us.  What I thought as Marcie’s paranoia and delusions crashed down on me crushed me.

To be fair, the screams, wails and sobbing of the other captives clearly told of tales as harrowing as mine; but practicality kicks in and one quickly learns that one must do what one must to survive.

I so much want to hug Marcie and apologise to her for doubting her, but that can never be. If it were possible it would mean that she too had not escaped the Goran slavers; and my guilt and shame would be doubled.  Secondly, even if the Gorean slavers brought her to this planet, our movements are so circumscribed that the odds of our paths crossing would be astronomical.

I would not wish a Gorean slavery on Marcie.  They are trying to turn us all into the most lascivious and abjectly subservient sluts, and I fear they are succeeding in my case.  No Marcie is too classy, too sophisticated for this life.  I had thought myself to be the same, but in my secret hidden heart I fear that I am that Jezebel, that tart, that floozy; this training is bringing just such traits out in me whether I want them to be exposed or not.

There’s a man, one of the jailers, I think may once have been of Earth.  Perhaps he knows a way back to your world, Marcie.  I shall cuddle up to him, prostitute myself to use the Earth concept, and try to get him to transmit this message.  If he tears it up and makes me howl under the lash for my temerity then so be it.

Know then, Marcie, should you ever come across this message, that I abase myself and grovel before you, begging for your forgiveness at my stupidity, thoughtlessness and arrogance.

I pray fervently to the gods of this place, the Priest-Kings, that you escape the slavers and find new and better friends than I have been.

Additional Illustrations

 

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[1]     US: Apartment